Yeo Workshop is delighted to present the inaugural Arnoldii Arts Club Design Commission featuring Edward Clydesdale Thomson, a Scottish/Danish multi-media artist based in the Netherlands.

With a unique sculptural language, Clydesdale Thomson’s installation presents art as the everyday, his sculptures living as though characters in daily life. Renowned for mimicking design tropes associated with domestic landscapes; whether a garden fence, washing line, wall paper or a carpeted floor, Clydesdale Thomson seeks to free his materials from their intended function and open up new readings. Seemingly banal objects and imagery are carefully constructed within a poetic narrative and invite a re-interpretation of the roles of the artist, the object and the gallery.

The Distracted Gardener & The Plumbing Subverter shares the same world. Surrounded by decorative pattern rolled onto the walls, at once a wallpapered wall and a verdant garden, Clydesdale Thomson has created a universe that is both interior and exterior. Drying sculpted sheets of aluminium are delicately spread over stretched clothes lines, the hard hostile material draped as though fine lace. Rolled hose pipes lay awaiting action on the gallery floor. A sense of peaceful distraction prevails as these anthropomorphised sculptures co-inhabit the same territory. Clydesdale Thomson believes that art does not need to be in constant address to its audience but that it can sleep and wake as we do. As his sculptures rest together, there is a prevailing sense of their permanent existence well beyond the moment of our experience within the gallery space.

About the artist:

Edward Clydesdale Thomson (b. 1982) is a graduate of the MFA program at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam and the Barch program at the Glasgow school of Art. In 2011, he won the Lecturis Award and a year later completed a residency at the prestigious Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. Notable recent exhibitions include causa finalis, Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam (2012), Secret Gardens, TENT, Rotterdam (2012), and Prix de Rome 2011, SMART Project Space, Amsterdam. Clydesdale Thomson has taught at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam and The Art Academy, Tromsø, Norway.

Image courtesy of Yeo Workshop